1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cooking apparatus in which means for detecting opening and closing of door and a light sensor are equipped.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There have been attempted various methods for simplifying operation of a cooking apparatus. Among those, the height of food is detected by means of light sensors such as light emitting and receiving elements so that the position of a heater that is freely movable in the horizontal direction is adjusted to irradiate heat most effectively. In other case where the volume of food changes with intensity of radiation heat, the heating is adjusted and controlled by detecting the height of the food.
In those conventional techniques, for example, there are provided a light emitting element and a light receiving element disposed counter to the light emitting element. The technique utilizes the cases where the light from the light emitting element permeates to reach directly to the light receiving element and where a light ray emitted from the light emitting element is interrupted by the food. The cooking apparatus executes cooking in a cooking mode selected by the user.
Accordingly, since a cooking mode of the conventional cooking apparatus is selected by the user, there are equipped a plurality of operational keys indicated such as warm key 111, defrost key 112. oven key 113 so as to choose a desired cooking mode, as shown in FIG. 1A. FIG. 1B is an overview of the conventional cooking apparatus having such provisions shown in FIG. 1A. After the user presses one of the keys and selects the cooking mode among warm. defrost, oven and grill, cooking is started for the selected cooking mode.
However, the user must operate to choose individual keys according to a desirous cooking mode for the food. For example, the user must operated separate keys such as warm key, defrost key, oven key, grill key and so on, so that the number of the operational keys are ever increasing so as to deteriorate the operability thereof.